Threads

Bus
I took the bus to Norwich on Thursday and made a list of the birds I saw on the journey; not very many it turned out.

1. jackdaw
2. woodpigeon
3. starling
4. rook
5. collared dove
6. black-headed gull
In the hedge there are fat pink blooms of Himalayan balsam (which I'm supposed to hate but don't).
Woman in the row behind me: Julie says she's got them invitations ready.
7. swallow
8. pheasant
9. house martin
Man in high visibility jacket gets on the bus.
10. lesser black-backed gull
Rabbit at a field's edge.
Hornbeams crowding round a bus-stop.
Linnets, perhaps, too far to be sure.
11. blackbird
12. feral pigeon
13. blue tit
14. goldfinch
15. mistle thrush
Man in the row behind me: I quite like doing it now and again.
Paramedics jump the lights.
On a billboard: We can help you go further.

Thread
A conversation, later on Thursday, between a marsh tit and lovely winsome Suzie, who for the past six years has inspired children to get involved with wildlife, often through wildly creative crafts, but whose last day at Norfolk Wildlife Trust it was:

Marsh tit: Do you have any thread?

Suzie: No, I don't; I lost my thread.

Sea-watching
That's what we did on Friday from dawn: watch the sea and little else. Our watching, to be fair, was broken by flurries of Sandwich terns, by shear-winged gannets, the odd fulmar and a handful of brutish bonxies. Quiet though it was, it felt good to be birding beside old friends and to reminisce about the many times we have watched, the sea and other things, together.

Not deadly
Among the constant refrains of teaching children about wildlife is: I saw that on Deadly Sixty. I have nothing at all against the show but it was wonderful tonight, at the end of a bat walk, to hear a young lad tell me: Today I've learned that wildlife doesn't have to be deadly to be cool.

It doesn't, no.

New over a blustery sea today

	Birds
850	great skua	Stercorarius skua

2012 Totals
Mammals: 82
Birds: 850
Reptiles: 20
Amphibians: 8
Fish: 11

The North Sea

The North Sea in music
Yesterday, unexpectedly, my great friend Gav turned up at my door on a surprise visit from London. We grew up raising binoculars side by side and saw innumerable birds together for the first time. Gav is an opera singer and was full of excitement about a Proms performance of Britten's Peter Grimes in which he'd sung last week. Without knowing he was in it, I'd caught the end of the show on Radio Three as I drove home from leading a bat walk at Kelling Heath. It was thrilling, in a little-hairs-on-the-back-of-my-neck way, to hear my old friend talk of his excitement at singing in a performance of rare brilliance of this, Benjamin Britten's troubled take on the North Sea and a North Sea community.

Fish not seen near the North Sea
Gav knows greatly more about fish than I do and has been breathing down my neck (and operatic basses can breathe quite powerfully) about the paucity of fish on my list. He's right of course and, spurred by his visit and by his tip-off about a good spot at which to lob bread at common and mirror carp (sadly, for my purposes, two forms of the same species), today I bought cheap bread and lobbed it. I couldn't find the right spot so I went to another nearby. No carp came and I looked a sad specimen chucking little balls of bread at the water.

Fish seen in the North Sea
Though I failed to score the carp I was more successful with fish in the rockpools at West Runton, adding two new species to my list. I like to make it look as though I lead rockpooling sessions in order to advance the cause of marine conservation but no! The real reason is that small children are demons for finding scarce fish and bringing them in buckets for me to identify. Thus today I finally saw my first long-spined sea-scorpion of 2012 (a species which deserves a mention in dispatches for its name alone) and a five-bearded rockling (also no shirker on the name front). If I'm honest (always) there's a slim chance it was a shore rockling as I neglected to count its barbels but my erudite friend Dawn Watson of Seasearch East is happy that my identification is sound.

Cephalopods ancient and modern
Though not a vertebrate, today's rockpool star was a small cephalopod found by Peter Walton, my delightful Kelling Heath naturalist colleague. It was either a little cuttlefish Sepiola atlantica (which Dawn tells me are abundant off our coast at present) or a young European common squid Alloteuthis subulata (slightly confused where habitat is concerned). Either way, it was great to see a living cephalopod as I spend much time telling children about fossils on the beach and giving them handfuls of belemnite fossils. Belemnites were more-or-less comparable cephalopods which lived in the sea covering what's now Norfolk in the Late Cretaceous some seventy to ninety million years ago. How wonderful to show children ancient fossils and their still-living relatives side by side. If a design works, why change it?

Birds over the North Sea and its coast
A Mediterranean gull, a swift, two yellow wagtails and a fulmar. Everyone on the move.

Belemnite fossils from West Runton beach 

New in the rockpools today

	Fish
10	long-spined sea-scorpion	Taurulus bubalis
11	five-bearded rockling	Ciliata mustela

2012 Totals

Mammals: 82

Birds: 849

Reptiles: 20

Amphibians: 8

Fish: 11

Turd

Sound comes readily to me. It's a big part of the way I interpret the world. So bird songs have always been easy to learn, as have new languages. In the same way I've never had any problem understanding English-speakers with widely different accents to my own. It came as a surprise then, a couple of years ago, to learn that I didn't have a good grasp of a Hull accent.

Bright eight-year-old lad from Hull (while pond-dipping with me): I saw a turd.

Marsh tit (unsure quite how to respond): Erm... what sort of a turd was it?

Bright eight-year-old lad from Hull: Well, I don't think it was a natterjack.

This evening Leanne and I saw six turds, two of them common and four of them natterjacks. We were wandering along the top of a wild beach, through an ankle-shredding stand of prickly saltwort, listening to the murmur of redshank and ringed plover on the low-tide mud. The natterjacks were a delight: rotund, squat, absurdly short-legged, beady-eyed and very charismatic. They scuttled into the marram at our approach and we took care not to disturb these threatened and highly protected animals. On our way back we saw a frog in my headlights - our third amphibian in the space of an hour - and I had to stop the car to usher him across the road. A little further on a young fox needed no such help.

On the beach as darkness fell I glimpsed a rabbit in the distance and, before I could see what it was, said, 'What's that?'. 'Lion,' answered Leanne, sardonically.

New on a wild beach tonight

	Amphibians
8	natterjack toad	Epidalea calamita

2012 Totals

Mammals: 82

Birds: 849

Reptiles: 20

Amphibians: 8

Fish: 9

They think it's all over

For the first time in ten days, today a turtle dove sat on a lamp post outside Morisson's.

And, just when I thought it was all over, four swifts burst through a bubble of house martins: everyone moving south in a damp off-white sky.

Seven swans

Cley today was many-coloured. Sheets of reed in bruise-red flower, spattered at their edges with perennial sow-thistle gold and the burnt-toast seeds of alexanders. Greys were in the backs of the great loaf of gulls on Simmonds': hundreds of black-heads and lesser black-backs, and among them one common, one herring and one flat grey yellow-legged. A moodier grey, like the smudge of an artist's finger in a pencil sketch, was in the seven young swans at the scrape's edge. On Arnold's were six spoonbills, white, and round the black feet of a cow in the Eye a wagtail, yellow, but Sufjan wrote no song of them.

I saw a sign in the sky:
Seven swans, seven swans, seven swans.
I heard a voice in my mind:
I will try, I will try, I will try.

Sufjan Stevens
Seven Swans

Dogs love me; and I love them. I grew up with them and I readily trust their easy big-hearted straightforwardness. What went wrong today then? On the West Bank, with sea aster flowering mildly mauve about us, I met two lovely golden retriever crosses. Golden retriever crosses, as placid and accepting as they come. But one of them took against me, snarling, barking. Her owner apologised, making it worse: I'm sorry, she normally likes everyone. Beneath was the silent subtext: What's wrong with you that my dog can see? 

She normally likes everyone.

Act I, scene i
But I that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amourous looking glass,
I that am rudely stamped and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph,
I that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them [...]

William Shakespeare
Richard III

New on Simmonds' today

	Birds
849	yellow-legged gull	Larus michahellis

2012 Totals

Mammals: 82

Birds: 849

Reptiles: 20

Amphibians: 7

Fish: 9

Turtle doves

If you haven't already done so, please click here to read Talking Naturally's short post on a British company which is offering holidays to Morocco to shoot migrant turtle doves. The turtle dove, as anyone with a pair of eyes or ears in the UK countryside will have noticed, is in disastrous decline. If you agree with Talking Naturally, in its opposition to UK companies promoting the commercial killing of declining wild birds on their migration, please write respectfully and constructively to those concerned urging them to desist. Thank you.

Chiroptera

Old man's beard ties knots in hedges and the still green edges of woods. Still green but in the leaves of willows now are autumn's yellows and rowan berries are already red.

Under a pastel-smudged grey sky, and in a cobwebbed world, I wait for noctules and for Jerry. The noctules never come but Jerry does. He is Kelling Heath's bat expert and he's kind enough to let me join his bat walks to continue learning. Most of what I know about bats I've gleaned from him.

He leads his group through the woods and past ponds. Common pipistrelles put on a fine show, soprano pipistrelles too, a noctule is heard on a bat detector as it passes above in the dark, but the clear star of the show is Jerry's enthusiasm for these extraordinary creatures. Little known by most, less understood, reviled, and silently wiped out by our Blitzkrieg management of most of the landscape, bats have a tough time of it. But they have friends in Jerry and others like him who night after summer night share with people the lives of these remarkable animals.

I was reminded of words I read many years ago in Bolivia:

Quoting Merlin Tuttle:

We recognize that we need bees: They produce honey, they pollinate our crops. We're careful to leave bees alone, that's all. It should be like that with bats. We don't get excited about the fact that more people die of food poisoning at church picnics annually than have died in all history from contact with bats. Now, here we have a chance of dying so remote compared to all these other things, and we're terrified of bats. Thousands of us die annually at the hands of our own spouses! Yet I don't know anybody who is afraid of getting married for fear they'll get killed by their spouse. What I'm saying is, unless you're living in abject horror of all these other threats to your life, it really makes no sense at all to be afraid of bats.

Diane Ackerman

The Moon by Whale Light